Tag: Grammar Girl

Yes, you can try this at home

Since one of the previous tips went on and on about why it’s not a good idea to negotiate pricing with an editor, it seemed only right to offer some tips on how to save money working with a dissertation editor. First, some background. Most editors use the same method to estimate the cost of editing your dissertation or proposal. We edit a few sample pages and estimate the cost per page. I always ask to see the entire file (title page, TOC, references, and appendices) because those add-ons can be the real time-suckers. Here are some money/time saving tips:

Use spellcheck

You’d be amazed how many people don’t spell check their dissertation before sending it to an editor, or worse, to their chair/advisor or committee. I know it’s a pain because every proper name comes up even though you’ve said not to flag capitalized words but it’s worth it. Even then it’s worth it to really read it carefully. And you might do a special check for words that may be spelled correctly but aren’t what you want to say.

But don’t use “autocorrect.” Sorta funny story. I was editing a research paper that included the word “biodata” and somehow every instance was changed to “bidet.” Okay, at least I thought it was funny. There may be other words in your field that could be a problem.

I recently edited a dissertation on education in public schools and did a search for “pubic.” I got three hits. Oops.

One client spelled phenomenological wrong in the title. That’s just wrong.

Turn on grammar editing

Active voice is used for most non-scientific writing. Using active voice for the majority of your sentences makes your meaning clear for readers, and keeps the sentences from becoming too complicated or wordy. Even in scientific writing, too much use of passive voice can cloud the meaning of your sentences.

I love Grammar Girl. Here’s what she says about active vs. passive voice.

In an active sentence, the subject is doing the action.In the Marvin Gaye song “I Heard It through the Grapevine,” “I” is the subject, the one who is doing the action. “I” is hearing “it,” the object of the sentence.

In passive voice, the target of the action gets promoted to the subject position. If you wanted to make the title of the Marvin Gaye song passive, you would say “It was heard by me through the grapevine,” not such a catchy title anymore.

Use styles

I should make this tips number 1-10. That’s how much time it can save you. The number 1 tip is that there shouldn’t be a single word that’s “normal” in your dissertation.

I’ve included an example of how you might want to set up styles. The ones I use most are Heading 1, Heading 2, body text, list paragraph, and references. I also set up styles for three levels of Tables of Contents.

Pay attention to references

My Dad used to start a lot of sentences with “If I had a nickel for every time…” Now it would probably be “If I had a dollar…” Readers often go to references first. If you don’t follow APA in your references they could wonder about your entire document.

Back to “If I had a dollar…” …for every time I saw an entire reference list with hard paragraph returns for each line and the space bar used to indent five spaces for the next line. It takes forever to correct this but it has to be done. Follow APA religiously for references. That’s all I’m sayin’.

Ask your chair what is his/her pet peeve in mistakes in references. One editing client told me her chair went nuts because she had a space after the colon in doi:xxx. I now do a search for doi with “show invisibles” on to catch any extra spaces. Another client said her chair knew she wasn’t up on APA because she kept putting in a “Retrieved on date.” That was soooo APA 5th!

Literature Review – go with the flow

There are a billion things to say about the literature review but three you should watch out for. Use the same approximate number of references for each major heading. Watch transitions between paragraphs. Work on flow. The thing that’ll save your editor time is if you put citations in past tense. Jones and Smith (2005) found, etc.

Check your school’s guidelines

Provide a copy of your school’s guidelines to your editor and tell him or her what to watch out for if something is really different from standard APA 6th. Several schools want references single spaced with a double space between references. And don’t get me started on running heads.

Give your editor a heads up

Tell your editor the kinds of things your advisor or committee might be looking for – some care about APA, some about references, some about tables. Ask your chair/advisor what he/she could see that would be the kiss of death.

What’s left for the editor to do if you’re doing all the heavy lifting? Well this is where a good editor can really add value. A good editor will spot inconsistencies between chapters (You said there were four stakeholder groups and you only talk about three in your literature review.) And a good editor will point out if you come up with a conclusion with no foundation. And a good editor will suggest another way of phrasing a sentence to add clarity.

It all kind of depends on the number of revisions. Here’s an example where there were 1471 revisions in 65 pages. That means a lot of nit picky things. But it’s hard to add real value when there are 24 edits per page.